I have never watched a full episode of one of those reality shows featuring doomsday preppers, the over-the-top survivalists who prepare for the end of civilization, nuclear invasion, or natural catastrophe. I am however very familiar with preparing for the inevitable racial targeting that comes with being a woman of color working in educational institutions.
Many people at universities today are thinking critically about the safety of racially marginalized groups on campus and the threats to teaching politically-charged content in this post-election moment. I don’t mean to suggest here that this critical care and thought are widespread though. There are just as many places that move forward— business as usual— with their love affairs with classic Europe, administrivia, departmental parties, and neoliberalist regimes of outcomes assessment. Academics doing the work of questioning and thinking through where we are today, those who commit to pedagogy as something more rigorous than an anemic list of suggestions about teaching tolerance, are a rare gem. It seems to me though that institutional racism has long prepared us for the coming doomsdays on university campuses. The very campus protests related to #BlackLivesMatter showed us students who challenged their administrations to deal with the racism they were facing and not simply dismiss campus-wide white supremacy under the auspices of (for-whites-only) “free speech”? The very history of Black college student protest, dating back to the 1920s, connected off-campus racism with the treatment Black students face on campus. As an undergraduate in 1989, I never walked alone on campus, especially at night, not simply because I was a woman, but a Black woman. As women, we know we are always the potential victims of sexual assault, but as a Black woman, you also know that no one will care or notice when that happens. Black men on campus certainly weren’t any safer; Black masculinity does not offer that. They didn’t travel alone either for fear of the campus police who had no ability to see their bodies as part of the student population. Doomsday was always here.
Let my elementary and junior high school friends (and mom) tell it, I once had a rather unhealthy infatuation with the legend and genius we have come to call Prince. I stopped adoring celebrities in that kind of way long ago but I have always been someone who would ride or die for everything before Purple Rain (For You, Prince, Dirty Mind, and Controversy) + “If I Was Your Girlfriend” + “Adore” + so much more. At eleven years old in 1982, Prince’s 1999 was the first vinyl album I ever bought for myself, by myself, with my own money earned from babysitting. No borrowing or asking adults when it came to this album! The track, “Lady Cab Driver,” was my ultimate center of gravity though I couldn’t possibly have understood what that song was talking about (see the music player above).